Andrew Steele
America 20xy
July 26, 2010
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| Rear Admiral Morteza Saffari. | |
Iran’s military leaders are trying to reassure their people that the nation would stand strong against a possible U.S. or Israeli attack on its homeland if launched. Iranian state controlled news agencies over the weekend featured a number of stories quoting high- ranking Iranian Republican Guard members who stressed that the nation was fully capable of repelling any assault that U.S. threw at it. The tough talk from Iran’s military leaders, despite what they said, is a sign that its government believes the threat is real and is trying to raise its nation’s confidence in the war of words before any real fighting begins.
A top official in Iran’s Navy– Rear Admiral Morteza Saffari– claimed that hostile U.S. warships would be “easy targets” for Iran’s over 100 military vessels in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, which would swarm the warships if provoked. “As soon as the Supreme Leader wishes,” he said, ”or in case the enemy dares to exercise the smallest threat against the Islamic establishment, all the IRGC troops together with those Basij forces who have had the necessary trainings are ready to show rapid reaction to them.”
Another top official, IRGC Lieutenant Commander General Hossein Salami, told the press that Iran is now capable of mass-producing its home-made ballistic missiles, claiming that Iran had reached a “never-ending point” in increasing its quantity.
Former commander of the IRGC– Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi– reassured a group of school teachers on Saturday that the probability of a US-Israeli attack on Iran was low because Iran had greatly improved its defense capabilities in recent years. He stated that the the Iranian military is a great power in the Middle East, and that an attack against it would have consequences. “The Islamic Republic of Iran’s strategy is defensive and it will never launch an attack against another state,” Safavi told the Mehr News Agency. “Our defense doctrine is one of deterrence and should a country launch an attack we will retaliate and chase off its forces across the seas.”Iran has feared an attack from the United States since it was labeled as being part of an “Axis of Evil” by President George Bush back in 2002 along with its neighbor Iraq, which the United States invaded as an act of “pre-emptive war” in 2003. The rhetoric against Iran has continued under President Obama, who claims that Iran is trying to create nuclear weapons despite a 2007 NIE report that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and despite Iran having agreed to a deal earlier this year with Brazil and Turkey in which it would have its uranium enriched outside its borders…a deal that the United States rejected, insisting instead that U.N. pass sanctions against it in order to weaken Iran’s economic footing.
Early in July 2010, in a TIME Magazine story titled “An Attack on Iran: Back on the Table” author Joe Klein he wrote:
“…the U.S. Army’s Central Command, which is in charge of organizing military operations in the Middle East, has made some real progress in planning targeted air strikes (on Iran) — aided, in large part, by the vastly improved human-intelligence operations in the region. “There really wasn’t a military option a year ago,” an Israeli military source told me. “But they’ve gotten serious about the planning, and the option is real now.”
Cuban leader Fidel Castro warned earlier this month that an attack on Iran by the United States and Israel was “imminent” and that such an attack could trigger a global nuclear war
